Stranger Ballet

Afternoon; 2011

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Well before the release of 2010's sturdy, sprawling Sad Sour Future, Iowa rockers the Poison Control Center embarked on what they dubbed an endless tour. At press time, an end appears nowhere in sight. Along their way, the band carved out a little time to lay down their latest, Stranger Ballet. Half as long and nearly twice as lively as its predecessor, Stranger Ballet is bright, boisterous, and instantly appealing power-pop, jammed with the kind of immediacy you hope to put across when you've only got a half-hour or so to impress and the sort of smart, starchy hooks that hang with you long after they're over.

Each member of the band's songwriting trio ups his own lyrical ante on Stranger Ballet. Patrick Tape Fleming's words are more charmingly sincere, fellow guitarist Devin Frank's are slacker and more impressionistic, and bassist Joseph Terry's are both sweeter and more surreal. Musically, though, their styles have grown far closer, perhaps a byproduct of all those months on the road flitting through the van iPod. Hints of spindly alt-rock touchstones from Built to Spill to pre-Maladroit Weezer bump heads with glam and late-90s indie spazz, but with much of Sad Sour Future's excess fat trimmed back, who PCC sound like seems far less important this time out than what they sound like. Here's a band that's enjoyed an enormous confidence boost over the past couple of years, and while there's still a kind of aw-shucks humility to the proceedings, the giddy effortlessness of these hooks suggest that these guys know precisely how good they've gotten.

As on Sad Sour Future, there's nary a bad tune in the bunch, but I'll call Terry's gleefully manic "Underground Bed" the set's highest high-- like a Thermals song with the vitriol sucked right out. That's the other thing about these guys: Except for maybe Frank's sad sour missive about "shit and piss" on opener "Torpedoes on Tuesday..." and Fleming's weepy "Born on Date", there's never a second where the band's not having a blast making this racket. You can hear the smiles wide across their faces, and that feeling's catching. Even when soul belter Mona Perkins does an awkwardly ebullient "Gimme Shelter" routine on a couple of these tracks, the ill-suited pairing gets over on sheer jubilance. Nearly a decade deep into their career, you couldn't blame these guys for coming off a little ragged, especially after the exceedingly ambitious Sad Sour Future. But Stranger Ballet finds the PCC raring to go, eager to please, and enjoying every minute of the wild ride they've found themselves on.